Main House is where the action’s at. Entering off the porch, you go into this open-floor-plan kitchen/living room. Near the counter and stove, which are on the right, there’s a beat-up antique dining table where the Exes eat their meals, and left of the room’s center, where afternoons the Exes meditate, cushions are set on the floor in a semi-circle. To the far left there’s this really narrow, high-banistered stairway going up to a loft space.

          Then you go into the back part of the house; recently a wall separating two bedrooms was torn down, and now the space is a single big practice room. Its windows face the forest, so the light that comes in is filtered through evergreens. The room is full of instruments and amps, and off in a corner is a soundboard. It’s a big enough space but it isn’t huge, so when you first walk into it what you notice is the sheer volume of stuff. But the longer you look, the more you see that everything is arranged to occupy the least space.

          Every day at 11:50, the Exes and the blonde girls converge before the stairs that go up to Main House’s porch, for noontime meditation. “The ol’ ball-and-chain,” Dawkins explained to me in excusing himself to head up that way, and winked and patted my shoulder. He’d been swinging in a hammock, I’d been sitting in a lawn chair beside him, we’d been talking about Earl Scruggs (“Just effing ridiculous”), Daniels had been reading in a lawn chair next to mine.

          Lunch is at 1.

          After lunch, there’s this moment when you’ve had two or three beers, and you step onto the porch into the dry heat, and you notice how slowly the blood in your head is thrumming, and then you realize that same blood is thrumming with equal slowness in your chest, in your arms, even in your feet. Entoptic threads transparently drift across your view of the sky and the dusty trees and the bare ground. Montgomery Fairweather has an old fiddle lying around and wants to jam with you, and there’s no need to feel self-conscious because he’ll play banjo and he’s a beginner on that instrument. Over in town, there’s a two-screen movie theater playing something goofy—if just two people express a willingness to drive in, others surely will follow suit. The sun is almost at its highest point: this will continue.

          All these things, these factors, have like a lockbox combination caused the afternoon mysteriously to open; this very afternoon is a composition where the parts have been made and placed according to their benefit to the whole, like the songs on a Your Exes album.

          So a while later, Jimmy Daniels and Clayton Jones were playing horseshoes and I was sitting near them and talking to them and we were all five or six beers deep. It was hot and smelled foresty and the horseshoes were producing clouds of dust spotlit in the sun. I would unintentionally brush the cold side of my sedentary beer with my knuckles. I would watch dust puff from the ground the horseshoes hit.

          I was asking how the Exes know when they’re ready to start a new album, or whether they do. Jones finished his beer and ran up to Main House to get us all fresh ones. He came back, and I asked my question again – and then he and Daniels dropped that the Exes, like directors with storyboards, map their albums out so closely before they ever start recording that they know precisely how long the process will take before it even begins. Daniels was getting ready to toss his shoe and he said, “First we get our songs down. And then we all agree on the album’s name. And after that” – toss – “we’re pretty much ready. How Clayton said.” He looked over at me mildly, as if to say, “Y’know?”